"When Everything Changed", a Book We Lived Through
Our book group remembers women's and civil rights in the 1960's and '70's
A note to my own Gen X kids: the secret’s out! At college in the early 1960’s your mom slept every night on damp hair in big plastic rollers. I didn’t sleep well, but all day in class my uncomfortable pantyhose kept me awake.
It’s all in the book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (2009). I’ve read it, just to see how everything changed (while I was looking the other way). And so did some friends, who shared their thoughts with me.
Gail Collins begins her book with an incident that got press attention in 1960. A 28-year-old secretary named Lois Rabinowitz showed up in New York traffic court to pay a $10 speeding ticket for her boss, an oil company executive. When the magistrate saw how she was dressed, he ordered her to leave. “Do you appreciate you’re in a courtroom in slacks?” he demanded.
Out in the hall, Rabinowitz told reporters she would “go home and burn all my slacks”. Later, the magistrate said he acted to protect ideal womanhood more than the dignity of the court.
For women, it was time to come down off the pedestal.
It took a long time to undo confining cultural and economic patterns that young women like me were playing out in college and in our homes, our marriages and our jobs. But clothes and appearance weren’t the only issues. There was also money. One of the women who read this book told me,
After I was divorced in my 20’s (in the 1970’s) I was denied a gas company credit card. When I re-applied, not checking marital status or sex, using my initials rather than my name, I got a card by return mail.
Another woman said,
I still recall my husband’s anger when I got a credit card and a bank account in my own name — at the insistence of my mother who was always a bit ahead of her time. Even though I used my new savings account for AC in his VW bug, and to get him an 8-track player for it, he was incensed.
I believe this was the beginning of the end for us — the final straw being my enrollment in a masters program. It was OK (and necessary) for me to have a job but NOT a career!
At that time, our roles in the national economy and even in the women’s liberation movement, were invisible to us. Now, as we read When Everything Changed, we recognized ourselves as part of the culture that had been changing.
One member of our book group said,
I was surprised to learn of all the political activity women had been doing behind the scenes — for decades — to get laws passed that began to give parity to women in various areas.
Many in our generation (I am 79) were busy raising families, many worked. We weren’t aware until laws actually got passed and affected us. Most had no time to take part in political activities.
We might have known about Gloria Steinem, who was literally the face of women’s liberation, and even subscribed to her new magazine, Ms. But how many of us followed Betty Friedan?
At the time, some of us read Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, but her message didn’t always get through. I didn’t know that she was becoming “the mother of feminism”. Our own mothers might have given us signals that there must be more to life, but I for one, didn’t have the experience to interpret them.
One reader in our group said she was paying attention then. But even she didn’t realize the full meaning of the movement. She told us,
Way back in the ‘60’s when I read The Feminist Mystique, I didn’t comprehend what Friedan was saying. She was one of those rare women who recognized how our culture had shaped us — and I didn’t get it!
But I did see that nothing would change until men’s roles changed, too. Today, I read about men’s and boys’ struggles as they come to grips with the full participation in society that women are gaining, and I can see more clearly that major cultural shifts have to include everybody, not just women.
The need to include everyone was also noticed by another woman in our group, who pointed out serious conflicts in the feminist movement.
Reading Friedan with my mother in my high school years, Germaine Greer in my 20’s, being an early subscriber to Ms. Magazine and a proud feminist, I was disheartened to read in When Everything Changed about the movement leadership giving women of color a backseat.
I guess inclusion is the biggest challenge and most important value we need to work on now.
We were surprised to learn from Collins’ book that when feminist leaders advocated for economic equality for women, in the conservative South it didn’t mean all women.
In the book, Collins writes,
In 1964, U. S. House member Edith Green of Oregon had thought of adding a women’s rights amendment to the Civil Rights Act, but the Johnson White House convinced her that it could endanger the legislation’s chance of passage.
She decided Black Americans had to come first. ‘For every discrimination that has been made against a woman in this country, there has been ten times as much discrimination against the Negro,’ she said.
It was an old and painful debate. The fight for women’s rights and the struggle for racial justice had almost always been linked in America.
Speaking at Harvard in 2013, Collins said that the Civil Rights Movement had made the country sensitive to fairness, thereby helping to clear the way for women’s rights.
Another great change that helped open the door to women’s rights was the economics of The Pill. A report of Collins’ speech at Harvard said,
“When birth control pills became widely available, applications by women to law schools and medical schools went through the roof,” Gail Collins said.
For families to maintain the lifestyle that was popular after World War II, women had to go to work. One salary was no longer enough, given the tough economic conditions of the 1970s.
Collins said, “When women work, they are powerful. In this country you are not taken seriously unless you have an economic role. It was the great mistake the suffragists made. They thought if you had the vote, that’s all you needed.”
So women’s roles began to change. Slowly. As one member of our book group said,
Our culture had done its job on us. It teaches us our roles, and how to survive and succeed. Both men and women learn what culture expects of each of them.
But what amazes me are those individuals who see that the roles that confine us are imposed on us. They give the rest of us courage to speak up, stand up and get elected to office, and to change the rules that hold us back from the full range of human activities that we are capable of carrying out.
This work is not finished. This book reminded us that our personal experience as 60’s and 70’s women has given us a valuable perspective.
One of us said,
It is the story of the times we grew up in and lived through. Now we are writing what will be for many of us, the last chapter that we will be a part of. We have a Sisyphean task, but that seems to be the nature of times of climactic change.
We may not get to see the fruits of our efforts but I know we are each making our best effort to make a difference as long as we are here!
Another said,
I remind my granddaughters of how we struggled in ways that are unthinkable now. I thank the women who sacrificed for the women’s movement. The work is not finished, but we all need to let our voice be heard — by being a conscientious voter!
There is so much more to say about women’s rights and civil rights — about human rights — now that they are being threatened again around the world.
But Collins’ book, and especially my fellow readers’ comments, have made me aware of our young new leaders. This time I’ll recognize their passion for change. I will do what I can to help clear their way.
I will add this book to my TBR stack. I hope the major events in it are covered in public school curricula. I'm concerned about pre-teen and teen girls now (and some adults) being shamed for how they look, and the subsequent increase in plastic surgeries for THAT reason. Some things don't seem to change. But we are SO much freer than decades ago!
Helen told me her book club was reading this book and I’ve just finished it. It’s fabulous fabulous and like Linda said yet we’re not there yet!!